On Wednesday, 7 September 2011, units of the Afghan National Army were engaged in an area control operation in the Mobayan village
area in Kapisa, with French units in support. In the morning, French units were violently attacked several times as they supported
the disengagement of Afghan units. During the fighting, a French soldier was killed and several others wounded: one is severely injured,
two others are seriously injured and others are slightly affected and have been treated on FOB Tagab.
---- French Ministry of Defense

After an incident much like the actual one described above (the village of Mobayan is named in the film), Marine and Aurore, who have been friends since they were very young,
arrive in the Greek half of Cyprus with the rest of their French Army unit for three days of decompression. They have been in Afganistan
for six months.

Since 2008, all French soldiers returning from a foreign war go through a "decompression" under the care of army psychologists,
to help them remove the images of war from their minds. The program includes sports, yoga, boat trips (when possible), and meetings in
which each soldier must tell the story of his or her six months in combat. In the film, virtual reality is used to aid the soldiers in
telling their stories. There is no indication that the French army actually makes use of VR in their decompression sessions.

The difficulties of readjusting to normal existence after combat are effectively illustrated by Aurore & Marine's spontaneous trip
into the countryside. The soldiers respond to everything in a combative way. There are subtle differences in the ways each of them expresses
their acquired pugnacity, but they all have a need for an enemy. One is left with the idea that reintegration into civilian life, even after
three days of "decompression", will be very difficult for all of these characters.

Three animals, a dog, a goat, and a pet snake appear in the film. Ness (Jérémie Laheurte) is a dog handler, and Aurore describes in some
detail how he reacted to his animal being blown up. (We see none of the blood and gore in Voir du pays, only the psychological consequences
of it.) Ness stares wistfully at two things. The first is the hotel pianist (Zoe Kokkala), and the second is a dog belonging to one of the
tourists at the hotel as it runs through the lobby. Marine brings her snake with her concealed in a sock. While driving through the Cyprus
mountains, the soldiers hit and kill a goat. The death of the goat causes Marine to release her pet snake into the wild, symtollically
putting Afganistan behind her. Aurore tells Marine on the plane ride back to France that the army is not for her. That she will find something
else to do.

"We have sought to be neither black nor white, and to come closer to the human experience: what does it mean to go to war when one has a
woman's body? How does a trauma materialize? Why in 90% of the cases, there remains an image? Because it is proved by the psys that in
most cases, the trauma crystallizes on a sense. Which can be an odor, a sound, but in the majority of cases, it is an image that remains
printed in the brains of the combatants, and which prevents them from living."
---- Muriel Coulin (to Caroline Besse of Télérama (8/9/2016)

There are two things left curiously unresolved in Voir du pays. The first is Ness's longing glance at the hotel pianist. (We never see or hear
anything of her again.) The other is the rifle in the trunk of the Cypriot's car. We are shown the rifle, and sort of expect someone to do
something with it at some point, but that never happens.